Body 2.0 — Continuous Monitoring of the Human Body

Singularity Hub has a story about the development of technology that will some day allow for the constant, real-time monitoring of your medical status, and they take a look at current technological advances to that end. Quoting: "Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status? Years from now people will look back and find it unbelievable that heart attacks, strokes, hormone imbalances, sugar levels, and hundreds of other bodily vital signs and malfunctions were not being continuously anticipated and monitored by medical implants. ... The huge amounts of data that would be accumulated from hundreds of thousands of continuously monitored people would be nothing short of a revolution for medical research and analysis. This data could be harvested to understand the minute by minute changes in body chemistry that occur in response to medication, stress, infection, and so on. As an example, the daily fluctuations in hormone levels of hundreds of thousands of individuals could be tracked and charted 24/7 to determine a baseline from which abnormalities and patterns could be extracted. The possibilities are enormous."

Comments

Re:No

[davester666]

Don't forget the Heisenberg uncertainty principle... The more closely your health is monitored, the likely the monitoring is going to affect your health.

Re:Can be counterproductive

[jamstar7]

Every test costs the patient time, money & pain. Each test also costs the doctor/technician/lab/hospital/insurance company time, money & paperwork.

Yup. Around here, medical malpractice suits are rampant, so the doctor's liability insurance goes through the roof unless they order piles of tests to cover their asses. The patient's insurance pays for them, so they bitch about unneeded tests designed to 'fish' for things to look at even closer just in case something happens and the patient's survivors decide to sue.

End result, the lawyers make money defending and suing doctors.

What I don't like about 24/7 realtime monitoring of me is, the extreme likelyhood (on the order of 99%+) of my insurance carrier starting to dictate my life. I've been smoking for 40 years, no cancer in sight even though cancer tends to run in my family (colon & lymph rather than lung or throat or oral), but I know damned good and well that since according to statistics, I'm 4 times more likely to get lung cancer than somebody who doesn't, my insurance will demand I stop smoking right fucking now or face cancellation. Doesn't matter that I choose to smoke, that I accept the risks. After all, I have a 0.056% chance per year of getting lung cancer (169,400 cases per year, 300 million US citizens, easy math).